Toby Green on John Gray

The Independent, 29 June 2007

Creative genius can at times be connected to crisis. Some of the most pathfinding literature and philosophy of the 20th century emerged from disaster. The most insightful work of Achebe, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn would not exist were it not for the debris of massacres. No one reading this new book about "apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia" can be under any illusion but that this is also a time of crisis. Indeed, one of John Gray's supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions.

Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack of thought) in the political landscape. This is the refuge in fantasies which derive either from apocalyptic religion or from secularist utopianism. Such fantasies, he shows, drive the neo-conservative agenda and are the true origins of the crisis faced today.

At first, this analysis may not appear original. Gray is hardly alone in drawing attention to the influence of the apocalyptic Christian right in America. The most disturbing instance came in October 2003, when under-secretary of defence William Boykin declared that the enemy in the "war on terror" was "a guy called Satan". As Gray notes, instead of this remark heralding the end of Boykin's career, he continues to work at the Pentagon.

Gray's importance, however, lies in tracing the connections of thought rather than in outlining the detail of politics. Black Mass shows the intellectual linkage between today's religious rhetoric and movements as diverse as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis. His deep insight is that the underlying structure of modern politics derives from Christianity, and that the return of overt religious language to politics is merely the renewal of a latent characteristic.

There is much here to stir controversy. When British politics subsists within the parameters of secularism, the idea that this secularism is derivative of Christianity is highly provocative. Yet the argument is meticulous and persuasive. Gray shows lucidly how the secular utopian projects of both communism and Nazism were vehicles for religious myths.

Both ideologies held that after a great struggle the optimum social organisation would emerge for a chosen people – proletarians for the communists, Aryans for the Nazis. In this process there was a redemptive quality to the violence, which was an essential part of the process of revolution which accompanied the change.

This may seem a long way from Christianity but, as Gray shows, the concepts of an "end time" and of a final struggle leading to harmony are central to early Christian theology. Furthermore, "the very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion". Thus the ideas of the most brutal atheistic regimes of the 20th century derived their imagery from religious thought.

Nor is the influence of religion on political ideals restricted to these extremes. Gray goes much further, arguing that the "evangelism" of democratic liberalism itself derives from Christianity. In this light, the prevalent view amid the pseudo-comfort of the political classes of London and Washington, that the world has settled on democratic values and institutions as its political "end-point", is merely a reprise of the theology of an end-time that presages harmony. The liberal narrative of progress is itself a proto-Christian story ending in redemption, while the political goal of perfecting human relations is a secular mirror to the religious vision of heaven.

Yet none of this analysis means that Gray is as critical of religion as writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The humanist alternative to religion is itself, he argues, derivative of Christianity. Why else privilege humankind above other animals, if not for the anthropocentric worldview of the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Far from being outmoded and dangerous, religion is on the contrary a primary human need which contemporary society represses. In his most daring act, Gray applies classic Freudian theory. He suggests that "like suppressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it", and that it is this which causes "the perversion of politics by repressed religion".

This is pathfinding thought. Gray is unusual among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers in recognising the primary role of the passions in forming ideas. He is a compelling writer, dismembering his targets with surgical irony, as with his devastating analysis of Tony Blair: "For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities... he was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes."

This does not mean that his book is without its difficulties. A true sign of the originality of Black Mass is that it raises almost as many problems as it solves. There is, for instance, Gray's definition of a utopian project as one in which "there are no circumstances in which it can be realized". Quite rightly, he shows how under this definition the tag of utopianism applies both to the ravages of Nazi Germany and to the war in Iraq. Yet one can also wonder whether the entire Western project of peace via the suppression of desire in universal consumerism is not itself utopian. If so many systems of government are based on unrealisable dreams, could the human species itself be classed utopian by nature? This is not a question Gray poses, but it is a subtext of his book. If the answer is yes, his thesis comes dangerously close to a tautology, one which is true by the very terms of its definitions.

An optimist must hope that we can rise above delusional ideals. Yet on finishing Gray's book, one has little faith that this can happen through politicians. Instead, I was reminded of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist writer, who saw politics itself as the worst form of escapism: "Revolutionaries and reformers all make the same mistake. Lacking the power to master and reform their own attitude towards life, which is everything, or their own being, which is almost everything, they escape into wanting to change others and the external world. Every revolutionary, every reformer, is an escapee".